


wish that i could let you love me

by ennta



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-11 20:46:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16860019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ennta/pseuds/ennta
Summary: Words are Renly’s weapons, words are Renly’s armor; he wields them as his brother once wielded a war hammer, he shrugs them off when hostile tongues sling them like arrows. But these words. These words he is not prepared to hear.





	wish that i could let you love me

 

Words are Renly’s weapons, words are Renly’s armor; he wields them as his brother once wielded a war hammer, he shrugs them off when hostile tongues sling them like arrows. But  _these_ words. These words he is not prepared to hear.

“I love you,” Loras says again, carefully tracing Renly’s collarbones, his ribs, the sharp jut of his hips. Loras’s touch is fleeting and sweet, his fingertips warm, and when he looks up at Renly there is such an openness in his honeyed eyes that Renly’s breath catches.

“You’re only saying that because I fucked you so well tonight.” There’s a sudden tension knotting Renly’s body, so he stretches to diffuse it, arching his back and pointing his toes and reaching up so that his fingers brush the top of the headboard. He had meant the movement to gently push Loras away, but Loras stays pressed against his side.

Loras laughs, a huff of breath against Renly’s chest, but something keen and sharp snaps fleeting through his eyes, something entirely at odds with his unguarded adoration of a moment before. Something distinctly _Loras_ , or maybe something distinctly _Tyrell_ , but something unsettling nonetheless. It’s gone before Renly can pinpoint its meaning.

“I do love your cock,” Loras admits, reaching down between Renly’s legs to stroke the insides of his thighs. “But I love the rest of you as well.”

“The soles of my feet? The skin behind my ears?” Weak teasing, teasing with only a remnant of nonchalance to prop it up.

Loras pulls a blanket over the two of them, trapping Renly, keeping him close. He ghosts one finger along the curve of Renly’s ear, then presses that finger softly to the hollow of Renly’s throat. “The soles of your feet because you laugh when I touch them,” Loras finally answers. “The skin behind your ears because you shiver when I lick you there.” He tilts his head to place a chaste kiss on the underside of Renly’s chin.

Loras has kissed every patch of Renly’s skin in the months since their need swept them from squire and lord to lovers, and yet Renly is suddenly conscious of the vulnerability Loras’s touches imply; Loras strokes where a helm would blunt an arrow, where a gorget would foil a knife, where a breastplate would stop a blow.

Panic like skittering roaches settles in Renly’s stomach, but he won’t let Loras see his discomfort. Can’t. So he stares at the ceiling and rubs Loras’s back until Loras’s body goes languid with sleep. A dozen points of contact between the two of them keep Renly awake: Loras’s curls flattened against Renly’s shoulder; Loras’s soft cock against Renly’s thigh; Loras’s warm torso against Renly’s side. Renly’s heart beats a frantic chant: _too close too close too close_ , it thunders, _too close too close too close_.

Because one day Loras will leave. One day soon, even; he is more than skilled enough to be knighted, to be sent back to his family in Highgarden. Perhaps he will exchange letters with Renly and perhaps they will share a bed when they meet at tourneys, but these long nights suffused with firelight will end. Loras will find other comely suitors in the Reach, will share his body with them, and Renly …

Renly supposes he’ll find himself a stable boy with coarse hair and the smell of horses on his skin, or a hedge knight with an easy laugh and no reputation to tarnish. And that doesn’t bother him, not really. Not at all. After all, can one man truly love another as most men love women? Does Renly need anything more than a willing mouth and a warm hole to stick his cock in?

He doesn’t sleep until the sun begins to rise.

***

It seems a good idea to ride into Wavecrest as dusk settles over the Stormlands. Renly sets off alone in his plainest clothes: a grey tunic and brown breeches, a thick black cloak slung over his shoulders. It pains him to leave the castle walls in such drab attire, but tonight he needs to be discrete.

Wavecrest is one of the larger towns outside the walls of Storm’s End, boasting taverns and inns and stalls selling everything from baked goods to impressive forgeries of expensive jewelry. Renly rather likes Wavecrest; it presents itself with panache bordering on pretension, and Renly is a fine purveyor of both.

But it isn’t the atmosphere that has drawn Renly to Wavecrest as twilight deepens. There is a brothel here, one of the only reputable brothels within an hour’s ride of Storm’s End, and one where Renly knows he can find what he’s looking for.

He tethers his horse to a post in front of the brothel and gives a cheery wave up at the women calling lewd suggestions from the windows. Inside, the establishment is dimly lit by braziers, and it smells of an incense so fine that Renly is impressed. He has only heard of this place from other men in the castle; most found it too expensive and spoke of it with a note of longing.

It’s only a moment before a woman in a sheer tunic gathered at the waist slips over to Renly’s side. He wonders idly if she is clothed in silk or some imitation, and then she takes his arm in one of hers and uses her free hand to gesture at the women lying on divans in the large open room. Each one is in some state of undress, but none of them appeal to Renly.

“Do you see anything you like?” the proprietor asks him with a coy smile. “Ethelide,” -- a blonde with rounded hips and firm exposed breasts -- “likes tall men, and she’s very skilled with her mouth.”

“I will take your word on that,” Renly says genially. He leans a bit closer to the proprietor, hoping he is as unrecognizable as he believes himself to be. “But I confess my tastes are … unconventional.”

The proprietor raises one eyebrow, her face a bit colder. “We offer boys as well as girls, but I assure you we do not cater to other inclinations. You will find no young, and you will find no animals--”

It has been a long time since Renly last blushed with mortification, but he manages it now. “No, my tastes are not so base as that. It’s only that I came seeking a boy.”

“Well then.” The proprietor’s face lights up again as she leads Renly into another room off a long corridor. She lists off services and prices with practised ease, but Renly barely hears her. He’s looking at the men lounging about the room, his gut clenching now that he has come so close to following through with his plan.

There is a young man standing casually in one corner, his small and solid body draped in gauzy fabric; he stares at Renly through long eyelashes, one eyebrow raised. He has thin lips and deep-set eyes in an angular face, and his blond hair falls over his shoulder in a braid. He’s comely enough to take to bed, Renly decides, and before he can change his mind he’s paying the proprietor and being led to the finest room in the brothel.

The young man’s name is Eldwin. Renly doesn’t kiss him. Renly doesn’t speak to him. He lets Eldwin take his cock in his mouth and closes his eyes, fighting the urge to tangle Eldwin’s braid around his hand. He always tugs at Loras’s curls when Loras kneels before him like this, but he cannot let himself grow accustomed to the intimacy he shares with Loras. This, this room masquerading as a lord’s chambers, this stranger on his knees, is all Renly should need.

It’s all he can let himself admit to needing.

When Renly spills into Eldwin’s mouth, he feels only a weary primal satisfaction. It’s a bare echo of the way he feels when he is with Loras, but a bare echo of thunder is less frightening than a burst that shakes stone walls, and Renly thanks Eldwin awkwardly before hurrying back to his horse.

Three men dismount their horses as Renly mounts his; he recognizes them as knights from Storm’s End and draws his hood up to cover his face. Renly turns his head when they glance in his direction, then turns his horse away from Wavecrest and begins his journey home.

***

Renly doesn’t see Loras much at all the next day, but his absence is a relief. Guilt is not something Renly is intimately acquainted with, but it follows him all the same, wringing him hollow as he sits with Penrose in a lavish study, tending to matters of Storm’s End and the Stormlands around it.

By the time Renly starts back to his own quarters, he wants nothing more than to see Loras, to convince himself that his experiment in the brothel has been a success. To prove that he does not need Loras, not enough to echo back _I love you_ , not enough to kindle another panicked rush of _too close too close too close_.

The first thing Renly notices when he enters his bedchamber is Loras sat on the bed surrounded by a riot of color. It takes Renly a moment to realize that the strips of color are jagged pieces of fabric; it takes him a second more to register the shears in Loras’s hand and the doublet in his lap.

“What--” Renly doesn’t know where to begin. “ _What in the seven bloody hells do you think you’re doing_?” he hisses, incredulous, but Loras doesn’t so much as flinch at Renly’s anger.

“One of your knights told a very interesting story in the training yard today,” Loras says mildly, his eyes on the shears as he slides them through the doublet in his lap. He cuts it in two and throws it onto the bed, then picks up a tunic from the pile of clothes beside him. “You visited a boy at a brothel in Wavecrest.”

Incoherent rage nearly swallows Renly whole, but when he lunges forward to stop Loras, Loras brandishes the sharp shears at him with a raised eyebrow and a haughty tilt of his chin. He slices the tunic neatly down the middle and reaches for a crimson blouse made of Myrish silk.

“I’m beginning to think Baratheons don’t know how to love,” Loras continues. “Do you love me as King Robert loved Lyanna? ‘Enough to start a war, but not enough to keep to one bed,’ is how you put it, I think.”

Renly remembers that discussion, remembers Loras’s voice going soft as he said it would be beautiful to be so loved as Lyanna was by Robert. Renly knew Loras had only heard that story through song and secondhand history, and so he had disabused Loras of his romantic notions with a careless laugh and tales of Robert’s debauchery.

“ _I’m not my brother_ !” Renly shouts desperately, but he can hear Robert in his voice when he yells like this, and now he can see Robert in the way he had sought out mindless pleasure the night before. _Too close too close too close_. He can’t process this situation; far too many emotions course through him. He is guilty, he is terrified, he is sick because that crimson Myrish silk has come undone beneath Loras’s hands.

Silence but for the glide of the shears. Then, “You care more for these clothes than you do for me,” Loras whispers. His shoulders slump, but still he meets Renly’s eyes. “I licked your seed off your body, my lord. I let you spill inside of me. I got on my knees to suck your cock and bent over so that you could fuck me.” He suddenly looks far older than he really is, and Renly deflates.

“They mock me in the training yard,” Loras concludes. “Must you also make a mockery of me?”

Renly looks down at his boots. He sees only two ways out of this situation, each with a vastly different outcome. He can knight Loras and send him back to Highgarden, then spend each night thereafter in Wavecrest; he can spend his life wasting coin on clothing and cock, his bed cold until he inevitably marries.

He chooses his second option. Slowly, he sits down on the edge of the bed and picks up a shirt Loras has not yet turned to ribbons. It’s one of Renly’s favorites, made by a seamstress from Pentos from a rare fabric supposedly imported from Asshai. It’s worth much, much less than Loras is.

“Give me the shears?” Renly hates the hoarseness in his voice.

Loras hands the shears to Renly, his eyes tired.

Renly can’t make himself say _I love you_. Not yet. Words are not enough for what is welling up inside him. If love was what Robert felt for Lyanna, then what Renly feels for Loras is far, far greater. Too immense to name.

Renly cleaves the shirt in two.

**Author's Note:**

> [title](https://youtu.be/XCQK6LmhYqc)  
> [tumblr](http://knight-of-the-flowers.tumblr.com)  
> written for day three of [renly week 2018](https://rainbowguardassemble.tumblr.com/post/178297870868/this-december-1-7-we-of-the-rainbow-guard-will)


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